Homefront Multiplayer First Look

Share.

Home, sweet home.

By Martin Robinson

The battle for first-person shooter supremacy isn't being fought in campaign modes, and it's not going to be won by the one with the most weapons or with the most vehicles. It's going to be won on the servers of Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and of PCs, and it's here that THQ and Kaos's Homefront makes the best account of itself.

Homefront, for the record, does have those other areas ticked off handsomely. The backdrop sees John Milius reprise and retool his paranoid fantasy Red Dawn around more contemporary fears, with the Russians of the 1980's original replaced with the united Korea of an imagined near future. In short America has been invaded, its soil churned and burnt by an ongoing conflict sparked by the fall of San Francisco in 2025.

While the campaign sets itself at the turning point of the war some two years later, the multiplayer concerns itself with those early skirmishes. It excuses the action in neat fashion – 32 players run amok at Homefront's peak – and opens the door for some distinctive locales. Yes, the idea of a small-town middle America over-run by opposing forces might be familiar from the latter levels of last year's Modern Warfare 2, but Kaos's dedication to the concept reaps its own rewards.

Two maps are shown for Homefront's first multiplayer outing. The first, Cul-de-Sac, is a sprawl of once-quaint houses that's been tailored for more intimate battles. It's an eerie blend of the homely with the shanty, its driveways and yards littered with the flotsam of suburbia. Discarded sofas and impromptu iron shacks help describe corridors that flow into more expansive streets and feed into a series of choke points. It's a vision of an America invaded that's at once disconcerting and convincing, and it hosts some exciting gunplay.

It's here, with 16 players scooting, sniping and shooting through this tangle, that Homefront asserts its basic credentials. The firepower on offer here doesn't sway from the staples of contemporary shooters and neither do its core mechanics. Smartly, its control system is instantly familiar too, a relief no doubt to those who experienced the muddle at the core of Frontlines, Kaos's last effort.

If you're tired of helicopters, you're tired of life.

When its combat is up close and personal, it's even got the pep and zip to its action to keep it on a level keel with Modern Warfare 2 - though that 60fps mark is currently some way off, thanks in no small part to the pre-alpha status of the code we play. But it's the deviations from the formula that could make Homefront the dark horse of online shooters.

Ticking away underneath Homefront's multiplayer are some mechanics that have an impressive impact upon its make-up. It's chiefly the battle points (BP) that make the difference; they're an in-game currency earned in much the same way as you'd rack up XP in other games, with points pouring in for captured bases, kills and headshots.

BP can then be traded for in-game items, from drones through to airstrikes and vehicles from jeeps to through to tanks and much more besides. It makes for a dynamic that Homefront can happily call its own – there's a spend/save mechanic that comes into play as the BP rolls in and you debate whether to call in an airstrike now or hold out and deal out the damage yourself from the controls of an attack helicopter.

For a sense of the scale of Homefront's in-game economy, capturing a base is worth 250 BP while the top tier vehicles come in at around 1400 BP. It's a curve that ensures that Homefront's greatest machinery's within reach of the industrious, and also has an influence on the flow of matches. Battles are first fought with assault rifles and pistols; as it wears on they're fought with rocket launchers and Apache gunships.

Unlock fans fear not - there's a full XP system that sits alongside the BP.

All this comes alive on Farm, the second of the maps on show that can host the full suite of 32 players. It looks like Dorothy's Kansas ripped to shreds, the barnyards and out-houses of a once peaceful idyll making the perfect hideouts for snipers while the fields are torn up by vehicular combat. Those vehicles themselves benefit from another smart twist; if you've enough BP in hand it's possible to spawn behind the controls of a tank, for example, putting an overdue end to the act of players camping out by vehicle spawn points.

The one game mode available for the multiplayer reveal, Ground Control, does a good job of playing to Homefront's strong points. It's the mode being shown today. Three territories are spread across the map to be captured, with the team score totting up once they're in a player's possession. Once a score limit has been reached the territories switch, making for an ever-changing battlefield throughout the course of a game.

It's superficially similar to Halo: Reach's Invasion mode, though Homefront has more than enough that it can call its own to differentiate it. It looks like Kaos has nailed an intriguing mix of Modern Warfare's dynamism with the open-ended chaos of Battlefield in a way that the forthcoming Medal of Honor reboot is struggling to, and its own additions to the formula make it a worthwhile contender on the FPS battleground.